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The “staff picks” shelf in any good independent bookstore is a treasure trove of book recommendations. Unmoored from media hype and even timeliness, books are championed by trusted fellow readers. With many bookselling alums in our ranks, we offer our own “Staff Picks” in a feature appearing irregularly.

Yannick Murphy’s short story “In a Bear’s Eye,” from the O. Henry Prize Stories 2007, stunned me with its beauty and strangeness, and led me to her new novel, which is just as lovely, and just as strange. Murphy’s Mata Hari tells her life story from a prison cell in Paris as she awaits trial for treason. The book fluidly moves from the Netherlands, to Indonesia, to various cities in Western Europe, switching points of view throughout, the language begging to be read aloud it’s so musical, so dream-like. This novel is erotic (oh lord, some parts left me breathless), sad, and fascinating. Check out Bat Segundo’s interview with Yannick Murphy for more.

After cornet player Buddy Bolden suffered a mental breakdown during a parade through the streets of New Orleans about a hundred years ago and had to be put away, rumors began to swirl about his life. Michael Ondaatje’s first novel, from 1976, is a jazz riff on all the possibilities of Buddy Bolden. A work of fiction, the narrative line running through it involves his friend Webb’s search for Buddy after his sudden disappearance a few years before the breakdown, through the resurfacing, and then his final silencing on that fateful day at the parade.

That’s the thread. But this short novel unfolds, or rather, explodes, like a scrapbook filled with bits and pieces of Buddy’s life. Interviews with his former lovers, with his friends and band-mates, with the denizens of the underbelly of New Orleans circa 1907. A poem here, a list of songs there, these fragments seem so haphazard, and yet these contextual glimpses all hang together, swirling around Buddy. And when the music ends, they leave you with a rich story of a jazzman who swung to his own rhythms.

Texaco, by the Antillean writer Patrick Chamoiseau, won France’s Goncourt Prize in 1992. It has pretty much everything I look for in a novel: a sweeping plot, a great heroine, a rich setting (geographic and historical), an ingenious structure, and – especially – an exploration of the possibilities of language. In a resourceful translation by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov, Chamoiseau’s fusion of French and Creole seems positively Joycean. Recommended for fans of Faulkner,Morrison, and 100 Years of Solitude.

War is not only hell, it’s also addictive, at least for British war correspondent Anthony Loyd, who for severals years covered the conflict in Bosnia for The Times. In this honest and poetic personal account – no index of names and places – the young reporter breaks some of the traditional rules of journalism by taking sides in the multi-ethnic war and revealing how the high he gets from life on the battlefield is matched only by the high provided by heroin during the occasional trip back to London. “War and smack: I always hope for some kind of epiphany in each to lead me out but it never happens,” he writes. In the war zone, Loyd befriends civilians whose resilience is almost unfathomable. He also introduces us to modern-day mercenaries – not the highly organized and well-funded security details found in Iraq, but gritty thrill seekers from across Europe. These are fighters who don’t necessarily believe in a cause, unless that cause is war itself. The book is by no means a primer on the events that unfolded in Bosnia; it simply tells how in war some people get by and others die.

“The God of the Protestants delivered them under full sail to the shore of the debtors’ colony, fierce Welshmen seeking new life in a new land.” So begins the first chapter of the finest book ever written about rock and roll, Nick Tosches’ brilliant biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, Hellfire. Not a fan of Jerry Lee Lewis? Hate rock and roll? Couldn’t possibly care less? Doesn’t matter. Tosches’ style – mock-biblical, profane, and wild – will amaze you:

Old rhythms merged with new, and the ancient raw power of the country blues begat a fierce new creature in sharkskin britches, a creature delivered by the men, old and young, who wrought their wicked music, night after dark night, at Haney’s Big House and a hundred other places like it in the colored parts of a hundred other Deep South towns. The creature was to grow to great majesty, then be devoured by another, paler, new creature.

I’ve read nearly all of Boyle’s books, but his first (and the first I read by him) remains my favorite. Boyle is now well-known for his mock histories that refigure the lives of prominent eccentrics. But if those books are sometimes held back by the inscrutability of their protagonists, Water Music sings on the back of Mungo Park, an 18th Century Scottish explorer who ventured deep into the heart of Africa, and Ned Rise, a thief from the gutters of London who meets him there. It’s part Dickens, part comic book, and, as one reviewer once put it, “delightfully shameless.”

Embedding Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill, racial dynamics and the explosive 1970s at the heart of its narrative, The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem delves into the white world of Dylan Ebdus in the black heart of a changing neighborhood. It is the story of a motherless white kid estranged from his father and “yoked” by his schoolmates. It is also the story of Dylan’s brilliant journey from solitude to friend of burned-out-soul-singer’s-son Mingus Rude, to neighborhood punk, to Camden College drug dealer, to San Francisco-based music reporter. The trip is outward bound, but the reader is given the benefit of also traveling through Dylan’s heart and mind – be it through a delicious sampling of the era’s music, fashion and city life, or through exploits with Mingus and a ring that gives them superpowers. Lethem paints a brilliant cultural portrait of the U.S. by presenting Dylan’s isolation, desire to fit in – somewhere, anywhere – and transformation to readers. And, for music junkies, there is the added bonus of identifying endless trivia.

Stephen Miller’s Conversation: A History of a Declining Art is a smart yet approachable account of an art that most of us take for granted: the lively and friendly exchange of ideas among equals on topics lofty and commonplace, otherwise known as conversation. While Miller’s book is indeed a history – including different manifestations of conversation in the ancient world (the Spartans, for example, were known for their compressed, economical use of words and thus the word “laconic,” Miller tells us, comes from Laconia, the region surrounding and controlled by Sparta) – it focuses mainly on what Miller considers the heyday of conversation, eighteenth-century England, an age in which conversation was considered an art worthy of study and about which manuals and essays were written. Miller’s book – which he describes as an “essay – an informal attempt to clarify a subject, one that includes personal anecdotes” – is a nostalgic one, which views our own culture as averse to genuine intellectual and emotional exchange undertaken in a spirit of goodwill. We are either, he shows, too aggressive or too timid to converse about the opinions we seem to declare so boldly on t-shirts and bumper-stickers, and thereby we deny ourselves what the likes of Adam Smith, James Boswell, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson considered one of life’s greatest pleasures, as well as a means of sharpening one’s intellect, polishing verbal expression, alleviating melancholy, and acquiring new knowledge. “Society and conversation” Miller quotes Adam Smith, “are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquility, if, at any time, it has unfortunately lost it.” A timely, thoughtful book and one not to miss.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a friend told me that anyone who is serious about writing needs to read John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. I’ve since read the book a half dozen times and feel confident in amending the statement: “Anyone who is serious about reading needs to read John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction.”

Although Gardner is best known for Grendel, his retelling of the Beowulf legend from the monster’s point of view, The Art of Fiction, finds him at his most engaging. This is no mere how-to book. In simple, captivating prose, Gardner lays out his theory of writing, stopping along the way to add anecdotes about his own experiences as a novelist and commentary on works he admires. In the process, he thoroughly examines the structure of the modern novel, from plot to word choice. The first read changed the way I viewed both writing and reading, and I’ve come away from every encounter with new insight.

The “staff picks” shelf in any good independent bookstore is a treasure trove of book recommendations. Unmoored from media hype and even timeliness, these books are championed by trusted fellow readers. With many former (and current) booksellers in our ranks, we offer our own “Staff Picks” in a feature appearing irregularly.A Mercy by Toni Morrison recommended by EdanNow, Toni Morrison doesn’t need my staff pick (I’m sure it pales in comparison to her Nobel Prize in Literature), but I thought it appropriate since she’s a contender for this year’s Tournament of Books. Also, one time I tried to hand-sell A Mercy at the bookstore where I work, and the customer said, “Oh I hated her other book, you know, that Caged Bird Singing one?” So, let me set the record straight: Toni Morrison is not Maya Angelou. Got that? Also, I must say this: Toni Morrison has written an incredible and mesmerizing new novel. The prose in A Mercy blew me away, it was so strange and beautiful. From start to finish this book’s language put a charge through me – I actually felt the prose in my body, as a tingling in my wrists and up my arms. The language itself transported me to this historical era (the 1680s), and my mind had to shift to accommodate the language, and thus, this particular, brutal, past.The Mirror in the Well by Micheline Aharonian Marcom recommended by AnneLike a wanton lover, Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s Mirror in the Well leads you sensuously and breathlessly into the throes of an affair between “she,” the unnamed adulteress, and “you,” the beloved. Lust yields to ecstasy that seesaws into despair as the married mother of two’s web of trysts, lies, and longing grows larger. The blazing physicality of Marcom’s language is like a feminine countersignature to Henry Miller’sTropic of Cancer; the trapped wife’s ennui and awakening shares its soul with Louis Malle’sThe Lovers.The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye by Jonathan Lethem recommended by AndrewJonathan Lethem pushes the unsuspecting reader into one troubling, convoluted short story after another, then, when he’s good and ready, spits the reader out into the real world, leaving him twitching and scratching his head, barely able to catch his breath before luring him back into his alternate universe where futuristic horror butts heads with mystery and suspense.The genres aren’t new to him – his novels Amnesia Moon and Motherless Brooklyn ventured into futuristic sci-fi and mystery, albeit taking routes into these genres that I hadn’t taken before – but it’s a different experience to get these flights of fancy and fear in seven short bursts. I was exhausted and sometimes unsettled after each, but I couldn’t wait to get back into Jonathan Lethem’s crazy world.On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt recommended by EmilyA rare treat awaits those who missed On Bullshit when it came out in 2005. Professor Harry Frankfurt’s unassuming little volume (four by six inches and a mere 67 pages long – somewhat physically reminiscent of the original binding of Maurice Sendak’sChicken Soup With Rice) is not only, to use its own words, a “crisp and perspicuous” account of what bullshit is, but also a lesson in clean, graceful prose and logical, orderly thought.And what is bullshit, you ask? Quoting a bit of Longfellow that Ludwig Wittgenstein considered a personal motto:In the elder days of artBuilders wrought with greatest careEach minute and unseen part,For the Gods are everywhere.Frankfurt explains the mentality that these lines express: “The point of these lines is clear. In the old days, craftsmen did not cut corners. They worked carefully, and they took care with every aspect of their work. Every part of the product was considered, and each was designed and made to be exactly as it should be. These craftsmen did not relax their thoughtful self-discipline even with respect to features of their work that would ordinarily not be visible. Although no one would notice if those features were not quite right, the craftsmen would be bothered by their consciences. So nothing was swept under the rug. Or, one might perhaps also say, there was no bullshit.” And so beings an excellent explanation of the carelessly made and shoddy product we know as bullshit.For its clarity, gentle humor, conversational tone, and intelligence, On Bullshit is a delight. So charming is Frankfurt’s book, that even those traumatized by encounters with philosophy’s mind-wrecking titans (Hegel or Kant, say), might find themselves taken in.Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die by Mark Binelli recommended by MaxI’m not sure I have much fortitude for the mini-genre that has been termed “ahistorical fantasia” (coined by Matthew Sharpe author of Jamestown, perhaps the most widely recognized example of the form), but I do know that Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die, is undoubtedly ahistorical fantasia and undoubtedly a thoroughly entertaining book. Here’s the ahistoria: Mark Binelli reimagines Sacco and Vanzetti not as suspected anarchist bombers but as a slapstick comedy duo from the golden age of cinema. And here’s the fantasia: the pie and seltzer plot of Binelli’s pair slowly melds with the death-row fate of their real-life counterparts. The book is incredibly inventive and manages a rare feat: It is both challenging and laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes simultaneously.Ooga-Booga by Frederick Seidel recommended by GarthGertrude Stein aside, Frederick Seidel’s Ooga-Booga is the most excitingly strange book of poems I have ever read. In this case, the oddity lies not in the syntax, but in the author’s peculiar persona, at once cool and fevered. The collision of the “debonair” voice, the hallucinatory imagery, and a prosody keenly (even innocently) interested in rhyme and wordplay shouldn’t work, but it does: “And the old excellence one used to know / Of the chased-down fox bleeding its stink across the snow.” Consumed steadily over the course of a couple of weeks, Ooga-Booga reveals itself as a cohesive, almost novelistic statement about death, sex, wealth, motorcycles, and geopolitics. (And doesn’t that about sum it up?) I’m torn between the trenchant short poems and the long, visionary ones, like “Barbados” and “The Bush Administration.” Against the latter, one might say that elegy gets done to death these days. But when has it ever been so savage, or so full of joy?

For John Leonard, books were nothing less than an essential source of life, every bit as important as food, or oxygen, or love. For this reason, the title of the new posthumous collection of his essays and reviews is perfect: Reading For My Life: Writings, 1958-2008.

Here’s Leonard, brainy, wise, and self-effacing, painting his own self-portrait of the critic as a young man:

Like lonely kids everywhere, I entered into books as if into a conspiracy — for the company, of course, and for narrative and romance and advice on how to be decent and brave and sexy. But also for transcendence, a zap to the synaptic cleft; for a slice of the strange, the shock of an Other, a witness not yet heard from, archaeologies forgotten, ignored, or despised; that radioactive glow of genius in the dark: grace notes, ghosts, and gods. It’s an old story, and I won’t kid you: I became an intellectual because I couldn’t get a date.

And here he is on the way books shaped his sensibility:

I picked up my plain American style from Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, my dreaminess from Greek myths and The King James Bible, my social-justice politics from John Dos Passos and Ralph Ellison, my nose for phonies from J.D. Salinger, and my delusions of grandeur from James Joyce. At first I wanted to be Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, not to mention Prometheus…After a fast start, I haven’t published a novel in twenty years. The public has a way of letting you know that it will pay more for you to discover and celebrate excellence in other people, and rather less for your own refined feelings.

So that is what he spent his life doing: discovering and celebrating excellence in others. It would be impossible for any reader to agree with all of Leonard’s opinions, not because they tended to be left of center, but because he had so many of them on so many topics — literary, political, cultural, personal — and he didn’t just hold them, he tended to brandish them. (I say that as a compliment.) He regarded Milan Kundera as a genius. I say no way, unless you equate cleverness with genius. Leonard also loved the ancients, epics, myths, fairy tales, the wisdom of primitive man. He disliked the Beats after a while (“the spoiled spawn of college literary magazines” dressed in their black turtlenecks and dirty white sneakers), and he positively loathed Richard Nixon. Reviewing Six Crises, Leonard had this to say about the slush-fund scandal that led to the Checkers speech: “The Fund was a nasty little business, a third-rate scandal, really, and rather minor all the way around. But out of it emerged Nixon the cliche machine, the mechanical dispensary: drop in your coins, and out gurgles a wet and sticky sentimentality, a poisonous brew concocted out of mother, America, dogdom, cloth coats, really folks, and all the Technicolored garbage of the boy next door.” That was in 1962. I’m glad I haven’t read anything Leonard wrote about Nixon after 1975. My guess is it would be like watching someone empty an Uzi into a lifeless Clydesdale.

Considering how drunk he was on books — he claimed to have imbibed 13,000 in his lifetime, and I see no reason to doubt him — it’s amazing that Leonard had the time and inclination to sip on television, which he did for many years as TV critic for New York magazine and as a regular guest on CBS Sunday Morning. This book contains a shining piece of fruit from that productive sideline, an essay called “Ed Sullivan Died for Our Sins,” from Leonard’s 1997 book, Smoke and Mirrors: Violence, Television, and Other American Cultures.

In reading this long essay, two things become clear. First, Leonard was not only a brilliant critic, he was also a superb reporter. He tells us that Sullivan lived in a suite at New York’s Delmonico Hotel, with his devoted wife, a Renoir landscape and a small Gauguin. Sullivan rose at 11 a.m. and breakfasted on sweetened pears, iced tea, and a lamb chop. He had no limo. “Ed is a regular guy,” Leonard concludes. “Except…he’s made somehow of air.”

Second, Leonard was always writing about something larger than what he was writing about. In this case, he was using the story of a remarkable showman as a way to write about the atomization of our popular culture. The Ed Sullivan Show was democracy at its purest. “By being better at what they did than anyone else who did it, however odd or exotic, anyone could achieve his show, but nobody inherited the right,” Leonard writes. “Ed’s emblematic role was to confirm, validate, and legitimize singularity, for so long as the culture knew what it wanted and valued, and as long as its taste was coherent.” Along came the 1960s, and out went coherence, with a subsequent shove from cable, satellites, the Internet. What we got in place of Ed Sullivan, according to Leonard, is sulfurous remorse: “Sometimes late at night, in the rinse cycle of sitcom reruns, cross-torching evangelicals, holistic chiropodists, yak-show yogis, and gay-porn cable, surfing the infomercials with burning leaves in my food-hole, I think there must be millions like me out there, all of us remote as our controls, trying to bring back Ed, as if by switching channels fast enough in a pre-Oedipal blur, we hope to reenact some Neolithic origin myth and from the death of this primeval giant, our father and our Fisher King, water with blood a bountiful harvest of civility.”

Reviewing Smoke and Mirrors in The New York Times, Sven Birkerts expressed admiration, surprise, and disbelief. The admiration: “John Leonard is a writer of such consummate grace, wit and provocation that it almost doesn’t matter what he settles on as his subject.” The surprise: “I’m surprised at how little of Mr. Leonard’s invective is directed at the corporate octopus that lurks behind every wall plug.” And the disbelief: “Does he really believe that the medium shows us who we are rather than what a group of mammoth corporations thinks we’ll agree to pretend we are?” Good question, and I’m afraid the answer, too often, is yes.

Yet Leonard’s writing about television can also be almost painfully personal and acute. He tells us that while battling alcoholism he couldn’t bear to watch episodes of St. Elsewhere or Cheers because he didn’t ever want to see the insides of another hospital or saloon. The man knew pain and he cared about everything, even sitcoms.

But let’s get back to Leonard’s writings about books, which is where he shines brightest. His love of good writing is not only infectious, it’s also mind-expanding because his tastes were so elastic and catholic. He champions many of the usual American suspects, including Robert Stone, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, E.L. Doctorow (who wrote an introduction for this book), Michael Chabon, and Joan Didion. He also torches a few, including Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, and Jonathan Lethem. His boyhood delight in the shock of the Other led him to reach way beyond our razor-wired national borders to embrace Günter Grass (Germany), Jacobo Timerman (Argentina), Amos Oz (Israel), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Edward Said (Palestine), Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay), and Václav Havel (Czech Republic). And before it was fashionable, Leonard was a champion of many women writers, including Maxine Hong Kingston, Cynthia Ozick, Nan Robertson, Maureen Howard, and Doris Lessing. Toni Morrison was so grateful for Leonard’s support that she invited him to accompany her to Stockholm when she accepted her Nobel Prize. As Mary Gordon writes in the appreciations that close this book, “This is what John did for so many of us: He made us believe that the reader of our dreams is out there, waiting for us, listening, supporting, understanding, seeing, hoping always for our best, never relishing our missteps but cheering us on in this ridiculous enterprise in which we are involved.”

Edmund Wilson was often extolled as one of America’s greatest critics, but he insisted he was just a working journalist. I view Leonard the same way — not as some vaporous highbrow, but as a prolific, wide-eyed, and deeply erudite observer of the passing contemporary scene, equally at home writing about sitcoms and Nobel laureates, happy to show his face on television, and as willing to cash a paycheck from Playboy as from The New York Review of Books. For him, it was always the message, never the medium. He died of lung cancer in 2008 at the age of 69, and when I look at the blasted landscape of American book publishing and pop culture today, I can’t help but think that John Leonard died for our sins.

In a blurb on the back of Reading For My Life, Colum McCann calls Leonard a “national treasure.” I agree with him, and I almost agree with Sven Birkerts. John Leonard was a writer of such consummate grace, wit, and provocation that it doesn’t matter what he settled on as his subject. Note that I’ve elided Birkerts’s qualifying word almost.

Pasternak may be more celebrated, Babel more influential, Grossman more expansive, and Solzhenitsyn more heroic, but for my money, Andrey Platonov might be the finest Russian-language fiction writer of the Soviet era. It’s yet another black mark against Stalinism that “there is probably no twentieth-century writer of [his] stature who is so little known in the English-speaking world,” as Platonov’s translator Robert Chandler has put it. But with this volume, Chandler goes a long way toward rectifying the injustice. Soul and Other Stories reveals Platonov as an incomparable stylist and an utterly singular sensibility. Indeed, as in only the greatest art, the two form a perfect unity.

The Sufi-inflected novel from which the collection takes its title echoes the plot of several other Platonov works, including The Foundation Pit (one of my favorite books of 2009): An idealistic young man sets out to bring the fruits of the revolution to impoverished hinterlands. It would seem that this story can only end in one of two ways: propaganda (the revolution arrives), or dissent (the revolution is a fraud). The miracle of Platonov’s writing, however, is that the depredations it records somehow make his Utopian yearning burn brighter. As Soul‘s Mosaic protagonist, Nazar Chagataev, leads his ragtag “nation” across the deserts of Uzbekistan, he comes to see the ineffable…well, soul that blazes in every camel and turtle and tumbleweed, and, by extension, in every person. Of a “savage, enfeebled” mongrel, Platonov writes:
The dog lay down obediently; it was trembling from exhaustion – old, bewildered, lacking the strength to cease living the life that tormented it, yet still convinced of the perfect bliss of its existence, because in its very endurance, in its thin trembling body, there was something good.Soul is as visionary as any of Cormac McCarthy‘s Westerns – which it often resembles – but Platonov is looking in exactly the opposite direction. In Paul Eluard‘s formulation: “There is another world, but it is in this one.” The seven short stories that follow are, if possible, even better, transplanting Soul‘s huge-heartedness into more recognizably domestic settings. The tender irony with which Platonov observes his proletarian characters’ outward movements is balanced against sudden, startling forays into the interior. “Among Animals and Plants,” “Fro,” “The River Potudan,” “The Cow,” and “The Return” are, simply put, some of the best short stories of the 20th Century. (“Fro” is a good place to start, if you want to ease your way in.)

Soul also represents a correction, of sorts, to a previous NYRB Classics edition, The Fierce and Beautiful World, based on earlier Platonov scholarship. Such is the difficulty of bringing to American readers a writer whose work was, at various points, suppressed, bowdlerized, and destroyed. But now that Platonov’s fierce and beautiful humanism has infected me, I have dreams of seeing his other novels and collected stories translated and in print in the next decade. In the meantime, we can be grateful for the present collection, which can stand alongside the works of Svevo and Walser – and indeed, as Edwin Frankhas suggested, those of Kafka and Beckett – as a modernist masterwork.

The ongoing Tour de France is the most novelistic of sporting events: There is ample character development with riders responding to three weeks of brutal tests; plenty of intrigue with opportunistic alliances and rivalries springing up; masterful set pieces like ascents up the denuded landscape of Mt. Ventoux and group sprints through medieval towns; villains, be they deranged fans sprinkling the road with tire-puncturing tacks or a certain disgraced Texan; some upstairs-downstairs class tensions between aristocratic team leaders and their toiling, water bottle-ferrying domestiques; and finally, a romance between man and exquisitely engineered, custom-fitted and gorgeous machine.

Having already belabored the comparison, I’ll simply point out that the joys of watching the Tour and reading, say, a bit of Stendhal every day are not dissimilar, not least because both, however gripping, are inevitably plagued by longueurs. In some ways, the novel is a form about managing downtime, conserving energy to expend it more forcefully later, which strikes me as a good way to describe the riders sheltered in the peloton.

By contrast, Tim Krabbé’s revered The Rider is for those who like their drama condensed rather than parceled out over several weeks. The short novella is the autobiographical story of Krabbé’s experience at the one-day Tour of Mont Aigoual, “the sweetest, toughest race of the season.” Among his more colorfully drawn opponents are a muscular rider who “looks like the giant who was always throwing Chaplin out of restaurants”; a lithe climbing specialist (and bank teller) whose favorite opponent is himself; and Krabbé’s arch-nemesis, the “wheel sucker” Reilhan, a promising talent and perpetual drafter (that is, one who conserves energy by sitting in a rider’s slipstream) who finds “the idea of doing anyone even the slightest favor” intolerable.

Krabbé despises the “golden boy” Reilhan, but looks upon the few spectators on course with equal scorn. Spying a beautiful young woman, he instantly assigns her to the “generation of emblems” who is merely cheering for the “journalistic cliché” of the rider rather than the rider himself; finely attuned to such distinctions, the tetchy Krabbé gives himself over to a delightfully withering assessment: “Now that I’m five centimeters closer, I can see how pretty she really is. I hate her.” (He prefers the grazing cows who don’t bother to hide their indifference.)

“No worse way to follow a road race than to be in it,” notes Krabbé, as if constructing the narrative is as difficult as the race itself. Riders sprint off early and disappear from view, and he cannot be certain how far ahead they are or if he will eventually spy them up ahead with a “feeling of impropriety: like accidentally catching a glimpse of a woman in the nude.” The race takes the leaders approximately four and one half hours, though time in racing is subjective: “Three more minutes. Oh, how easy it will look on paper,” Krabbé wryly notes of the race’s final kilometers, which to him feel like an eternity.

The Tour covers 137 kilometers and traverses the Cévennes mountain range in Southern France, a region where as late as 1950, “some of the Catholic inhabitants thought Huguenots had only one eye, in the middle of their forehead…” These secluded high plateaus prove to be a wonderful setting for Krabbé’s depiction of road racing as a kind of anti-Enlightenment reaction, an imitation of life “without the corruptive influence of civilization.” The ordered procession of kilometers around which the narrative is organized fails to stem the race’s frequent illogical elements, how rival riders engage in “mutual self-destruction” and decisions are just as likely to be made through prudence as rashness: “Suddenly I know that I’m going to attack. The decision catches me off guard.”

In a wonderful chapter in his book-length study of the bike-obsessed Beckett, Hugh Kenner describes what he calls the “Cartesian Centaur,” more prosaically a man on a bike, a being who “rises clear of the muddle in which Descartes leaves the mind-body relationship. The intelligence guides, the mobile wonder obeys, and there is no mysterious interpenetration of function.” Krabbé steps in to re-muddle things, staging a Cartesian battle between body and mind. Describing one of his fellow riders, he writes:
Lebusque is really only a body. In fact, he’s not a good racer. People are made up of two parts: a mind and a body. Of the two, the mind, of course, is the rider.
But the rider is a very peculiar kind of mind, at once supremely rational and supremely irrational.

Any account of endurance sports must capture the descent into a personal, highly motivated, and masochistic madness, one that derives its impetus from defying, or rather ignoring, logic: “I’m only giving it everything I’ve got because no one says I have to. Only when there are arguments for something can there be arguments against it.” (Krabbé’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, delved into motiveless malignity rather than motiveless exertion.)

Krabbé writes that he “started on this sport fifteen years too late,” and one gets the sense that his reputation as the “scourge of the peloton” stems from his desire to make up for lost time. At times he sounds like a Raymond Chandler character: “We straighten up, drift along, fifteen seconds to breathe just for the fun of it.” Indeed, there is something similar about the respective codes of honor among noir private detectives and semi-professional cyclists. Marlowe would doubtless be as disgusted by Reilhan’s free-riding as Krabbé and his fellow races are.

Krabbé is also not without that amour-propre defining most athletes, from the biggest stars to weekend warriors:

I view my wrists, stretched out in front of me to the bars, straight as ramrods. They’ve become so tanned, almost black in the wrinkles. The little hairs lie next to each other in wet rows, pointing away from me. I find my wrists incredibly beautiful.

Vanity of vanities! What does man gain by the toil under which he toils under the sun? Beautiful, tanned wrists apparently.

The Rider is often cited as the best book on cycling, its quotes about pain and suffering and endurance and honor quoted admiringly. Certainly, Krabbé’s notions of honor and courage are exhilarating, but they are also a little ridiculous, which only adds to the book’s charm. Krabbé sets the tone early on by proclaiming to be shocked by the emptiness of non-racers’ lives. After an extended paean to suffering in which he has shown his own literary prowess, he concludes: “Suffering you need; literature is baloney.” Debating whether to shift into a lower gear on a mountain becomes a competitive as well as a moral dilemma: “Shifting is a kind of painkiller, and therefore the same as giving up.” And a final piece of bombast: “Being a good loser is a despicable evasion, an insult to the sporting spirit. All good losers should be barred from practicing as port.” Each statement strikes me as being a bit silly while also demonstrating an incontrovertible truth that “strikes to the soul of the rider.”

Sports writers often appeal to the chivalric tradition to capture the rare character of the most accomplished athletes; the best instinctually grasp that Don Quixotefurnishes a more fitting model — noble and absurd — than those bona fide knights of medieval romances. Of the legendary Jacques Anquetil, who would move his water bottle from his bike to the back of his jersey before climbs in the mistaken view that it lightened his bike, Krabbé, in a Quixotic formulation, notes that “What Anquetil needed was faith. And nothing is better for a firm and solid faith than being in the wrong.”

What makes The Rider a particularly appealing sports novel is that for all his seriousness, Krabbé knows how to let the air out of his inflated rhetoric. Lebusque, the courageous but poor racer, makes one last, not-so-vicious “attack” 130 kilometers in: “…he bobs past us like an old, rotten surfboard.” And our noble, long suffering hero who pours his life into the trial? “You sprinted like a jackass,” notes one spectator. The harsh critic makes no mention of the rider’s beautiful wrists.